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Most recently, Maturin's
Melmoth
the Wanderer. An enjoyable early 19th century melange of anti-Catholic
hysteria, Wandering Jew mythology, unreliable narrators, and stories within
stories within stories which begin to get confused with one another - less
a Chinese box than an overstuffed attic trunk.
Recent reading includes Peter Conrad, Modern
Times, Modern Places (Thames and Hudson, 1999).
Sample quotes
"The end of the world began, by common consent,
in Vienna."
"The secret garden depicted by Klimt or by Otto
Wagner's tiles was the enclosed preserve of symbolism - a realm of enigmatic
correspondences and arcane meanings. The links between earth and heaven
had been snapped, or at least hopelessly confused ... Symbolism still yearned
for the beyond, but could only guess at its whereabouts."
Randall Jarrell - Selected Poems
"Asked about it, who would not repent/Of all he
ever did and never meant, / And think a life and its distresses, / Its
random, clutched-for homefelt blisses, The circumstances of an accident?" |